The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world, with a prize of $50,000 bestowed annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. It was created to celebrate the 81 years of discerning, thoughtful criticism Kirkus Reviews has contributed to both the publishing industry and readers at large. Books that earned the Kirkus Star with publication dates between November 1, 2014, and October 31, 2015, are automatically nominated for the 2015 Kirkus Prize, and the winners will be selected on October 23, 2015, by an esteemed panel composed of nationally respected writers and highly regarded booksellers, librarians and Kirkus critics.

"Not the best or worst of the overheated, essentially routine thrillers (Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon, 1999, etc.) signed by the author's own double, but a puzzling waste of Oates's talent."

Like Henry James perversely trying to make a second career by conquering the London stage, Joyce Carol Oates seems bent on devoting part of her prodigious gifts to pseudonymous neo-gothic thrillers like this latest.
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"A mediocre vintage for the gifted and prolific Oates, or perhaps a sign that it's time to move on to triplets or quads."

Pseudonymous Smith, now officially unmasked as Joyce Carol Oates, dips once more into the troubled pool of star-crossed twins in the most overwrought of her seven gothic pastiches (Double Delight, 1997, etc.).
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"It's a mark of both Smith's unsettling power and its limitations that Terence's wayward obsession is so much stronger and more believable than the shadowy woman who inspires it, or even than Terence himself."

A cozy suburbanite who's won it all loses it, and perhaps his mind as well, when a summons to jury duty throws him together with a bewitching assault victim, in the sixth and most elaborate of Smith's neo-gothic fantasies (You Can't Catch Me, 1995, etc.).
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"Slick, professional, and utterly predictable—it reads like a sly and expert parody of the whole psycho-menace genre."

This latest gothic potboiler from the thinly veiled Joyce Carol Oates pits a wide-eyed suburban lawyer and his oh-so-perfect family against the convicted murderer who comes to live in their hometown when he's served the eight years of his ``life sentence.'' Though he's never met tattooed Vietnam vet Lee Roy Sears, Michael O'Meara was instrumental five years earlier in getting his original death sentence commuted to life, and he's kept up a correspondence (much to his beautiful, decorously promiscuous wife Gina's dismay) that encourages Sears to set up shop as a supposedly gifted sculptor in Mount Orion, New Jersey.
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